15/12/2005

Europe - an identity or a project?

The perceived threat of Turkish EU candidacy drives a wedge between European unity and European identity. By Nilüfer Göle

"Just as I cannot imagine a Turkey without a European dream, I cannot
believe in a Europe without a Turkish dream." These words of the
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk come from his talk at the Frankfurt Book
Fair on the occasion of his receiving the prestigious literary Peace
Prize in Germany this year in October.

Nothing in these words strikes the reader at first sight, but common
good will. Orhan Pamuk expresses his wish for reciprocity between
Europe and Turkey. The European dream in Turkey is a well-known fact;
Turkey articulates her dream in political terms by becoming a candidate
for the European Union. But the second part of the sentence concerning
the "Turkish dream" sounds inappropriate, if not awkward, in
translating the feelings of the majority of European citizens. It is
not that the novelist is unaware of the resentment and fear of European
citizens of the Turkish presence in Europe. The formulation of a wish
for reciprocity makes the asymmetry of desires between Europe and
Turkey become only more apparent and audible.

In the eyes of many Turks, Turkish candidacy for the European Union is
believed to be a continuous and almost a "natural" outcome of their
history. It is a widely shared feeling among Turks that in joining the
European Union Turkey will complete the long historical course of the
Westernization process that started in the late 19th century. The
European ideals have already shaped Ottoman reformist intellectuals,
"young Ottomans," and "Jeunes Turcs," formed by the influence of French
positivist thought and Jacobin tradition prior to the Republican era.
The foundation of the Turkish nation-state under the leadership of
Atatürk in 1923 can be read as a culmination of this process, but a
radical step, almost as a civilizational shift, as a way of turning
away from the heritage of the Ottoman Empire to embrace a "new life"
and a new nationhood and to become part of the European "civilized
nations."

However, from the point of view of European nations, the Turkish
integration with the European Union, a process that European
politicians welcomed in the past and started with the economic "Ankara
agreement" in 1963, does not seem to be that natural from the point of
view of the prism of present-day cultural politics. Turkish candidacy
became the most controversial issue, since the meeting of the European
Council in Copenhagen (12 December 2002), to decide the calendar for
opening negotiations with Turkey. The debate started first in France
where, unlike Germany, the Turkish immigrant population is not a major
issue. But in two years' time, the debate became part of other European
publics, including that of the Netherlands, Austria and Germany. Hence
the Turkish question became an agenda-setting issue not only for
internal politics, but also for the future of the European project. The
rejection of the European constitution by France and the Netherlands
can be read as the working of a new inward-looking dynamics. They were
also the two countries where the question of Islam was most debated.

The German legislative elections (September 2005) have illustrated as
well the extent to which issues around Islam, immigration, and Turkish
membership were becoming agenda- setting issues for internal politics.
The leaders of the "Christian Democrat Movement" (Angela Merkel and
Edmund Stoiber) have captured the public's attention and sympathy by
pronouncing their view overtly against the Turkish membership in the
EU. Similarly in France, politicians who were orienting their politics
on issues of security and taking a stand against Turkish membership
(such as the actual Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, but also
marginal figures of the nationalist Right in the French political life,
such as Phillipe de Villiers, who made himself a place by his political
campaign with the maxim "non a la Turquie") were gaining in popularity.

The content of the debate and the arguments against the Turkish
candidacy in the European Union did not remain the same but changed
over the course of time. The Turkish agenda of the 1970's was mainly
determined by the violation of human rights, the repression of Kurdish
claims of citizenship, the influence of the military power in political
life, the Cypriot discord with Greece, and the official denial of
Armenian genocide.

In the year 2002, the agenda changed. The questions
of European borders and European geography started to be discussed. For
those who argued against Turkish candidacy, geography imposed itself as
an observable fact; Turkey did not belong to European geography, let
alone history, and it threatened the unity of Europe. Including Turkey
meant for many an "infinite" enlargement, the loss of frontiers. "Why
not Morocco, and why not Russia?" were among the widely used arguments
to denote the "absurdity" of Turkish membership. Including Turkey would
have meant expanding the European borders towards the East and becoming
neighbors with those risky countries.

Another line of argument related
to the political context and the enlargement of Europe. Turkish
candidacy was not timely, according to those who tried to rationalize
the rejection of Turkey by economic factors and basically by the
impoverishment of Europe by the recent newcomers to Europe. Turkey
appeared as a burden that Europe could not include in its system (both
economic but also politically, Turkish members in the European
parliament were scared to outweigh others in numbers) without a high
cost. Above all, Turkey was not a small country, and bringing more than
50 million "Muslims" into Europe would make a difference. Indeed the
question of "difference" mattered most; the belief in cultural,
religious and civilizational differences with Turkey underpinned the
feelings and shaped the opinions of the European citizens.

The new list of arguments illustrated the shift of interest from the
Turkish problems to that of Europe itself. Turkey served as a catalyst
to bring into public debate the questions related to Europe. But Turkey
also served as the "other" for the redefinition of European identity.

In that sense "othering" Turkey became a way of "identifying" Europe.
The need for an "alterity" to define European identity was integrated
into the political discourse of those skeptical of the Turkish
membership in Europe. Turkey's entering into Europe would mean, as a
Dutch commissioner for the European Union (Frits Bolkestein) argued
prior to entry talks with Turkey, forgetting the date of 1683, when the
siege of Vienna was lifted and the Ottoman army was defeated. Hence the
memory of the past entered into present-day cleavages and
controversies. The objection of Austria, until the very last minute, to
the opening of negotiations with Turkey ( October 3, 2005) illustrates
the weight of these memories. (Austria agreed to remove her objections
under the condition that Croatia also began membership talks).

The opening of talks with Turkey marks an important date, but it brings
to an end neither the public debate nor the process of integration that
will take decades. One should notice therefore that an important shift
has occurred in European politics and transferred the power of
decision-makers to that of opinion-makers. The issues related to the
European Union were mainly in the hands of Eurocrats and, once resolved
in Brussels, these issues moved to national contexts and became part of
a public debate. The idea of a popular sovereignty that is extended and
juxtaposed from nation-State politics to the European Union illustrates
this shift. The idea of a democratic Europe came to mean building
Europe from below, with the foremost the necessity of consulting
people, and therefore a consensus on the need for referendums, whether
to vote for the European Constitution or for Turkish membership. The
idea of a referendum on Turkey, as one could expect, is mostly defended
by opponents to Turkish candidacy, counting on the popular vote
to reject it in ten years' time.

Yet ten years' time seems sufficiently long to Turks. They believe they
can transform in the meantime their societies accordingly. In ten
years' time, according to some democrat intellectuals, Turkey will
achieve the level of democratic stability and the eventual rejection of
Turkey by referendums in the European countries will not matter and
have no drastic effect. The presence of a European perspective would
have fulfilled its role. Such an argument might sound optimistic or a
way to de-dramatize the European anti-Turkish attitudes, but it
illustrates also the confidence of Turkish intellectuals in the
dynamics of the European perspective in Turkey, already at work.

The European perspective forced Turkey to reform the republican
definitions of citizenship. Turkish republicanism as the nation-state
ideology has been founded on two pillars: namely, authoritative
secularism and assimilative nationalism. For democratization, a need
exists to create a consensual "secularism" and not an exclusionary,
authoritarian one, backed up only with military power. In spite of the
ongoing cleavages and conflicts between hard-line Islamists and the
secularist establishment, one can witness that Turkish society has
experienced, especially during the last two decades, a "fall of the
wall" that has separated and divided two Turkeys; one composed of
educated urban and Western-looking secularist upper- and middle-classes
(labeled in the conversations "white Turks") and the other faith-driven
lower-middle classes (labeled "black Turks") originating from Anatolian
towns. The course of upward social mobility changed the
life-trajectories of many of those belonging to the latter group
(turned them into "grey," meaning partially whitened), who have had
access to higher education in the 1960s with emigration to urban
cities, profited from new market opportunities that expanded in the
1980s, and invested in the avenues of political power since the
electoral victory of the Party of Justice and Development. The thinning
of the wall between two faces of Turkey brought different publics and
cultural codes into close contact and interaction, albeit with intense
conflict, yet this contact transformed the mutual conceptions of Muslim
and secular publics and limited the claims to hegemony of the latter.

This was made possible by the opening up of a democratic space, shared
both by religious and secular, the first giving up the absolutism of
the religious truth-regime and the latter giving up its claims to
hegemony over the society. That the party of Justice and Development,
the Ak party, who had Islamic roots, won the November 2002 general
elections by democratic means and came to power in Turkey is an outcome
of this process of interaction.

The democratic sphere gained a momentum to the extent that the
polarization between the secularist establishment and Islamist radicals
was played down, leading to an intermediary space of debate and
representation. The European perspective reinforced the democratic
momentum and created a new political agenda of reform, a "common
dream." The mobilization of human rights movements in civil society,
the formation of a public opinion in favor of these reforms, and the
determination of the government and the political classes all
culminated in a series of reforms that were passed by the parliamentary
vote during the course of 2002-2003 in order to harmonize the Turkish
legal system with what are called by the European Union the Copenhagen
criteria.

One major example of these reforms is the abolition of the death
penalty. The Turkish Parliament voted in favor of abolishing the death
penalty (August 2, 2002), a first in a Muslim country. The
repercussions it had for Turkey were far more than expressing the
desire to embrace European values or just pleasing Europeans, as
cynical observers would think. At the time the death penalty was
discussed, the leader of the Kurdish movement (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan,
was in prison under the death sentence. In spite of the nationalists'
objections, the law passed in the Parliament with the help of those who
argued in favor of abolishing capital punishment, including the
sentence passed on Öcalan, and of the recognition of Kurdish rights in
Turkey. It was meant to be a victory of reformists against nationalists
in questioning the hegemony of Turkish nationalism in definitions of
citizenship. The Turkish skeptics in Europe dismissed these reforms
that they had considered on "paper" and as "cosmetic," meaning
superficial and merely done for strategies of seduction.

Apart from the Islamist issue and the Kurdish one, the Armenian
question still remains a major taboo for Turkish nationalism. The
official view of the past is based on the suppression and denial of the
1915 genocide that created a sort of short-memory and diffused amnesia
about the past for the generations of the Republic. One question is how
to remember the past and the second is to develop and express points of
view that are independent of the official one. The choice of words to
label the events, whether it is "deportation," "ethnic cleansing,"
"massacres," or "genocide" is becoming a battle ground for the public
debate that begins. The debate (more) is initiated by few Turkish
intellectuals, historians, including those of the Armenian community
who challenged the ideological version of the events, defying the
taboos of Turkish nationalism and exploring new ways of relating to the
emotional trauma of Armenians and developing a new narrative on the
historical past, albeit under the pressures of nationalist forces and
juridical intimidation. In that respect, the Istanbul Conference
signaled a new period in opening up a new mental and discursive space.
The conference brought together Turkish historians who wanted to pursue
a free discussion on the Armenian past of Turkey, in spite of the
pressures and postponement, which was at last held at Bilgi University
in September 2005. It marked a collective effort to break away from the
official discourse and to confront Turkish nationalism with its own
past.

I am not referring to a problem-free society but on the contrary
attempt to illustrate the ways in which Turkish society names and
debate the problems, trying to bring into public awareness those
subjects that were kept out of sight, repressed, or forgotten. The
crimes of honor and women's rights issues follow the same political
pattern; that is, it is with the help of feminist organizations that
the issue is brought into public attention and new legislation is
called for in favor of women's rights. It is rather the "way" of
politicizing the issues, carrying them from silenced arenas (silenced
whether by shame or repression) and giving them a plurality of voice
and visibility in the public sphere that points to the existence of a
democratic pattern that we can call the "European way."

The presence of a European perspective works in Turkey against the
fixity of identities whether they are defined in national or religious
terms. Embracing the European project means for Turks the dismantling
of identity knots, the ones that create obstacles for establishing
peace and pluralism.

It can seem paradoxical to note that when Turkey started to get closer
to European criteria for democracy, the arguments against Turkish
membership in Europe became articulated and expressed in offensive, not
to say aggressive, tones, to the surprise of the Turkish pro-European
democrats. In other words, the debate started when the Turkish file
grew thinner, that is when Turkey has started, as observers would put
it, "to do her homework," to resolve some of the problems in her file
and hence become eligible for European membership.

Turkish membership triggered an anxiety of identity loss and a desire
for boundary maintenance for European publics. The question of
geographic frontiers, civilisational belongings, religious differences,
past memories, were all themes that entered into the debate as a
constellation of insurmountable differences and set a new agenda.
Throughout these debates, Europe was constructed as an identity defined
by shared history and common cultural values rather than as a project
for the future. It is in contexts outside the core countries of Europe
(for instance in Spain, Portugal and Greece) that Europe appears as a
project and has the power of induction of democratization. In Turkey,
where Europeanness is not part of a "natural" historical legacy, Europe
is appropriated voluntarily as a political project, as a perspective,
promising a democratic frame for rethinking commonness and difference.

Turkish candidacy reveals the non-equation between European identity
and the European project. For the European countries there is not
difference but continuity between the two: the European Union is the
European identity (including Christianity) written large. Turkish
candidacy, perceived as a threat, reinforces the quest of identity
preservation and boundary maintenance. But the very richness of the
European past and heritage turns against themselves, against its claims
for universalism, as Europe develops a fixation on identity and hence
an obstacle to creating a "common" dream, a common project.

*

This article appeared in German translation in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 26, 2005.

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